Google L4 Experience | Reject

TPS (Day 0):

Q1: Given a Binary Tree with Zeros and Ones, find number of islands. Island is defined as connected nodes with only ones.
Q2: Same question with slight variation: https://leetcode.com/problems/accounts-merge/description/
Exp: I had seen both the questions, Solved 1 completely, and 2nd partially.

Onsite 1 (Day 15):

Q1: https://codeforces.com/problemset/problem/448/C Exact same question word by word
Exp: It didn't go well. The interviewer wasn’t interested in the brute-force approach, and I struggled to come up with an optimized solution. In the end, both of us ended up frustrated.

Onsite 2 (Day 16):

I waited for 20 minutes, but the panel didn’t join. Rescheduled to Day 22.

Onsite 3 (Day 17):

I waited for 20 minutes, but the panel didn’t join. Rescheduled to Day 23.

Onsite 4 (Day 18):

G&L Round General questions about leadership and being a team player.
Exp: This round went good. By this point, I had already lost interest due to my performance in the first round and because I had received much better offers.

Onsite 2 (Day 22):

Q1: Started with a simple question. Given a stream of messges with phonenumber and timestamp. Find number of unique phone number
Follow up: Unique phone-number in last K mins Asked me to write some testcases. I had a discussion with him on how to do this using schedulers and background threads
Exp: The interviewer was from Germany — very helpful and cooperative. This was my best round.

Onsite 3 (Day 23):

Q1: https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/2072047/google-onsite-banglore-may-2022-patient-kem0h/
Exp: I initially suggested a brute-force approach and discussed its time complexity. About 15 minutes before the end, I figured out the right algorithm (two min heap approach) and coded it (ofc, with one bug - I just had to swap the pair elements so that the priority queue would work based on the first element). The interviewer mentioned it was a hard problem to solve and implement optimally in time. I pointed out the bug, but she said it was okay and that she understood.

Feedback (Day 50):

After three weeks of silence, I had already joined another company. The interviewer mentioned that the overall feedback wasn’t up to the mark. I didn’t ask for individual round ratings. She asked if I would be open to considering L3 roles, I declined and said I would aim for L5 next year.